The OS: “Like Cousin Eddie and His RV”
If you’re a Chevy Chase fan, you know that, in the movie, National Lampoon’s Vacation, his wife’s cousin Eddie plays a bothersome, uncouth mooch – on the trashy side, too.
Well, I stumbled upon a blog post that talked about virtual machines as a problem for developers, not the answer, and that the real path to salvation will come when we murder OS and adopt fast, efficient platform-centric cloud computing. Here’s a classic quote from the post:
“VMs have certainly allowed us to (literally) think outside the box about how we characterize “workloads” and have enabled us to begin talking about how we make them somewhat mobile, portable, interoperable, easy to describe, inventory and in some cases more secure. Cool. There’s still a pile of crap inside ‘em. What do I mean? There’s a bloated, parasitic resource-gobbling cancer inside every VM. For the most part, it’s the real reason we even have mass market virtualization today. It’s called the operating system.
“If we didn’t have resource-inefficient operating systems, handicapped applications that were incestuously hooked to them, and tons of legacy networking stuff to deal with that unholy affinity, imagine the fun we could have. Imagine how agile and flexible we could become.”
The author is saying that virtualization is just a band aid because the real answer is to get rid of greed, moochy, resource-hungry operating systems and embrace the PaaS world, for instance the platform-oriented cloud.
He goes onto say that Cloud v1.0 “with all it’s froth and hype” will pale in comparison to Cloud 2.0 — “the revenge of SOA, web services, BPM, enterprise architecture and the developer. “ He warns, though: “… the protocols and models for how applications interact with the network are sure going to change and accelerate due to Cloud — at least they should.”
Looks like infrastructure folks will need to stay on top of things as we say goodbye to OS, virtual machines and hello to the cloud, or cloud2.0!
The world is sure spinning fast these days. Breathe!
